root@geeklanka$_

An event to mark the Software Freedom Day was organized by the Free Software Foundation and held in Boston over the weekend. I felt that a long drive was just what I needed to get my mind off the series of mini catastrophes that have been taking place at work during the week. I didn’t [...]

Recently, I’ve been taking a look at tools to version control and maintain my Debian packages in git.
Git, like mercurial, is a distributed SCM used to maintain the Linux kernel since version 2.6.12. Branching in git is very cheap, and merging is trivial and follows a decentralized model where developers can push and pull code [...]

FireGPG is a neat little FireFox plugin that acts as a front-end for GPG and provides seamless integration with Gmail. Once installed and Gmail support is enabled (which is, by default), a series of signing/encryption related buttons will appear at the top of the Compose Mail page.

It also lets you easily encrypt or sign any [...]

In a recent article, Ted T’so makes some interesting points on Sun’s motives behind OpenSolaris, and how it fares today in the FOSS ecosystem as a result.
“Fundamentally, Open Solaris has been released under a Open Source license, but it is not an Open Source development community.”
It’s quite sad that this is the case simply considering [...]

Here are the steps to get Linux running on a Palm TX. For the approach described, you’ll need an SD card, an SD card reader and a Palm TX that you can hopefully live without. Remember, backup the handheld using a tool such as JPilot. It’s really
quite simple and you’ll thank yourself later.
For the [...]

So, there’s a thread on the Debian mailing lists on a mascot for the project. Someone jokingly suggested a Marmot.
Marmots typically live in burrows, and hibernate there through the winter. Most marmots are highly social, and use loud whistles to communicate with one another, especially when alarmed.
Now if that’s not a reason why Marmot should [...]

You see, it was way back in the summer of ‘45 when I was a mere little laddie, stomping around in my school boy shorts that I was introduced to LOGO. It pretty much did it for me. If it wasn’t for LOGO, I’d probably have grown up to be a normal, well-balanced kid. But [...]

In an unsurprising turn, SCO stocks plummet as a judge rules that Novell owns the UNIX copyrights, and not SCO as McBride would have you believe. Not that I really care about SCO stocks, I really don’t, it’s just nice to see people finally catching on to the SCO bluff. Redmond played it beautifully, [...]

GPLv3 was launched on Friday (29) after close to eighteen months of public involvement in it’s drafting process. This has been an important milestone in the free software world as an upgrade to the GPL to address some of the more modern concerns have been a long time coming. I think Bruce Perens sums this [...]

I was under the impression that my thinkpad R50 had an IR port, but for the life of me I can’t seem to find it. I’ve been scouring every inch of my R50 all morning and came up with zilch. What’s strange is that IR was detected at some point in the past when I [...]